PL 41, col. 322
If, that is, we can understand the evening of this day and its morning with any fitness. For the knowledge of the creature, compared with the knowledge of the Creator, in a manner grows dusk; and again it grows light and becomes morning, when that knowledge too is referred to the praise and love of the Creator; nor does it fall away into night, where the Creator is not forsaken through love of the creature. In short, when Scripture numbered those days in order, it nowhere inserted the word 'night.' It nowhere says 'night was made,' but 'evening was made, and morning was made, one day' (Gen 1:5); and so a second day, and the rest. For the knowledge of a creature in itself is, so to speak, more faded than when it is known in the Wisdom of God, as in the art by which it was made. Therefore it can more fittingly be called evening than night; which nevertheless, as I said, when it is referred to the praise and love of the Creator, runs back into morning. And when it does this in the knowledge of itself, it is one day.
Fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt · cc-by
PL 41, col. 322 · pd
The City of God's compact restatement, and the one that travels. The observation that carries the argument is a plain fact about the text: through all six days Scripture never once writes 'and night was made.' Evening, yes; night, never. Augustine reads that as evidence that the vespera in question is a dimming of knowledge, not a darkness. Gregory the Great will make the same observation serve a moral reading, and the Glossa prints Gregory's version on 1:5.